Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:53, 6 June 2014

Revision as of 22:58, 6 June 2014

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"'''Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal'''" (a parody of the bestselling 1982 tongue-in-cheek book on stereotypes about masculinity ''[[Real Men Don't Eat Quiche]]'') is an essay<ref name=ryerson>{{cite web

| url = http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

| title = Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal

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| archiveurl = http://www.webcitation.org/659yh1oSh

| archivedate= 2012-02-02

}} ''"...&nbsp;Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL&nbsp;..."''</ref> about [[computer programming]] written by Ed Post of [[Tektronix, Inc.]], and published in July 1983 as a [[letter to the editor]] in ''[[Datamation]]''.<ref>Volume 29 number 7</ref>

Widely circulated on [[Usenet]] in its day, and well known in the computer software industry<ref name=Raymond>{{cite web

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===Modernization of the real programmer===

Over the years, the figure of the "Real Programmer" was taken up and adapted as new and more powerful programming languages were created. If the real programmer of the 1980s did it "all in [[FORTRAN]]" instead of [[Pascal (programming language)|Pascal]],<ref>[http://www.ee. name=ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html ''"...&nbsp;Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL&nbsp;..."'']</ref> one of the 1990s might have done it "all in [[C (programming language)|C]]", rather than [[C++]] or [[Java (programming language)|Java]], or "all in [[Perl]]" rather than [[Python (programming language)|Python]] or [[Ruby (programming language)|Ruby]].

The term is often used to describe a more [[bare-metal]] way of doing something—for example: "Real Programmers don't use [[integrated development environment|IDEs]], they write programs using <code>cat > [[a.out]]</code>" (that is, they write machine-readable binary files from beginning to end without making any mistakes). Each generation tends to slightly redefine a Real Programmer, as coding techniques change. For instance, a young [[Java (programming language)|Java]] programmer might refer to an older [[C (programming language)|C]] programmer as being a Real Programmer. In turn, these C programmers refer to older [[Assembly_language#Assembler|Assembly]] programmers in the same way.